


Rebel

by DaughterOfKings



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Cassian Andor-centric, Gen, Origin Story, POV Cassian Andor, Pre-Movie(s), Pre-Rogue One, Rebellion, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 12:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9490538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaughterOfKings/pseuds/DaughterOfKings
Summary: The story of Cassian Andor from child soldier to rebel spy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Well. I had a day off, and I wrote an origin story for Cassian. And I must thank my friend and partner in crime, [SkylandMountain1013](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SkylandMountain1013/pseuds/SkylandMountain1013), for her encouragement.

Cassian doesn’t take many memories of Fest with him when his family flees. He knows he was born in the far north, and then moved to one of the densely populated compounds near the equator. Summers were warm enough to spend above ground there, so he and the other children would take discarded scrap metal from the factories and use it slide down the snow-covered hills. Afterwards, they would troop into his mother’s kitchen to drink hot chocolate spiced with juice from the peppers she grew on her windowsill.

Sometimes, if they asked her enough, she would sing for them in her high, clear soprano, and smile when they tried to sing or drum along.

He thinks it was a good life. He thinks that he was happy.

* * *

He doesn’t remember when the war begins, but he does remember that his war begins while he’s with his father at an open-air market on Carida. They’re buying new shoes to replace the heavy, insulated boots they no longer need when a wave of demonstrators go marching past. They’re chanting slogans in at least three planetary dialects as well as Basic. It’s difficult to decipher exactly what they’re saying, but Cassian can hear their anger, their desperation.

His father says, “They’re asking for liberty. It means being able to make your own choices.”

“And de- demil-” Cassian stares hard at a hand-painted sign, struggling to sound out the words in his newly-learned alphabet.

“Demilitarization,” his father reads. “They want the Republic to stop using its weapons to force people to obey them.”

Using weapons takes away people’s choices, Cassian thinks. He’s seen the holovids of heavily armed clone troopers responding to protests like this one; his mother hadn’t wanted him watching, but his father said it was good for him to know the truth. Out loud, he says, “They should stop, shouldn’t they?”

His father smiles, the same proud smile he wore when Cassian brought his first award home from school, and asks, “Do you want to join these people, then?”

Cassian looks back towards the demonstrators. Some of them are carrying children younger than he is in their arms. “Yes,” he says with all the conviction he can muster. “Yes, I do.”

His father swings him up onto his shoulders and strides confidently into the crowd. Men close around them, murmuring blessings and reaching up to ruffle Cassian’s hair. One puts a rock in his hand, making sure his his fingers are closed around it tightly.

Cassian doesn’t even have time to ask why before a skittish security officer opens fire.

Something strikes him hard in the side of the head. He hears his father yell, feels himself tumbling toward the ground, and then-

He wakes up on the floor of a filthy jail cell, feeling pain in his head, his hands, his eye. His mother is in the corridor. He watches as she takes off her crystal wedding necklace and hands it to one of the guards, and he wants to tell her to take it back, to go home and wait for them to escape. It’s what he expects his father to tell her.

Instead, his father makes a slurred promise to buy another necklace, and she ignores it. She presses a batca patch against the deep purple bruising on his stomach, holding it in place so it can help him heal as they stagger their way to freedom. She leaves the bruises on his face untreated- “Let the people see what tyranny looks like up close”- and she doesn’t put splints on his broken fingers.

She splints Cassian’s, though, and warns him that he’ll need his hands for far bigger battles in the future. 

* * *

He never forgets that he became an orphan before the Republic became an Empire. He scoffs at the recruits who come in reeling from loss, the ones who claim in disbelieving voices that they never saw it coming.

“You should have,” he tells them.

No one ever argues that point.

* * *

It's a tactical choice, not a kindness, that the separatists who raised him insisted on educating the children in their ranks. Cassian can strip and clean a blaster rifle in less than a minute, and field dress a wound in less than two. He excels in mathematics, engineering, and navigation, and dabbles just enough in code slicing to be a menace. Oddly, though, it’s his proficiency with languages that Colonel Draven finds most interesting.

Cassian obligingly cycles through what he knows, randomly switching languages mid-sentence just to see how well his new commanding officer keeps up. He plays with the sound of his voice, too, because he can.

“Can you still speak Festan?” Draven asks after he slides from bland Imperial Basic back into his natural accent.

His mother had been adamant about that before she died, so he recites the first verse of one of her favorite songs to prove it. He doesn’t sing, but there’s still a lilt in the words that makes his fellow officers stare at him in surprise. He wonders how often they forget that he had a home before bouncing from resistance cells to Alliance bases.

He doesn’t hold it against them, though. He forgets sometimes, too.

If Draven’s impressed, he doesn’t show it, but he does hand over data pad with a dossier on screen. It’s an information gathering mission to the Outer Rim, long term work. Cassian scans a list of contacts, finds the names of at least three Festan men his father had served with on Carida, and lets his gaze flick past them as if they mean nothing.

Just because the colonel already knows otherwise doesn’t mean that he should give it away.

This is a test, he thinks. The Alliance has decided to see what forcing him to confront his past will do to him. They’re not expecting him to break- they need the intel too badly to risk sending someone who might not get it- but they do want to see what he’s made of.

“You leave in four hours,” Draven tells him.

Cassian puts the data pad in his pocket and snaps off a precise salute. “Yes, sir.”

* * *

He’s barely nineteen when he earns his captaincy. Two of their bases have been raided, their personnel killed, and the Council can’t afford to have scruples about his age- not that it ever could- so there’s not even a discussion. Draven pins the new rank insignia on his jacket, assigns him a squadron of commandos to use as assets, and sends them to the Expansion Region to gather intel on the Imperial Weapons Program.

Most of the commandos come from Alderaan, as does the funding for their weapons and technical gear. Cassian doesn’t know what happened to Bail Organa to turn him from pacifist to covert recruitment agent and financier, but he can guess well enough. It’s just a matter of what- and who- the ex-Senator lost.

The ranking lieutenant, Vidya, is the lone member of the squadron from Onderon. She spends the jump through hyperspace singing a war prayer to gods that only she believes in, but the others don’t seem to mind it. One of the men explains that they would sing similar hymns on Alderaan to ask the Force for guidance during times of trial.

He shrugs a bit self-consciously and adds, “It doesn’t hurt to ask, sir.”

Cassian says, “There were hymns on Fest, too.” He doesn’t say that his mother didn’t live long enough to teach him all of them, or that it’s getting harder and harder to remember her voice.

* * *

Vidya teaches him how to hold his liquor in between assignments. The taste of cheap homebrew never stops setting Cassian’s teeth on edge, but he gets better at hiding it- and better at preventing hangovers the next morning.

She only breaks out the good stuff after four of their men die in a dogfight above Aquaris. They pour out four shots and smash the glasses. Then they summon the rest of their squadron for a briefing on their next operation.

The Alliance is holding on by the most tenuous of threads, and they have work to do.

* * *

He spends four months impersonating a droid mechanic in the Imperial garrison on Thustra before his cover is blown. He barely has enough warning to close the blast doors outside the repair room where he’s been working. The commandos have been causing mayhem for the cargo ships with all the actionable intelligence he’s been sending; when he comms Vidya for an extraction, she says they’re at least forty minutes out.

“Your prayers didn’t work,” he tells her just as the alarm bells start ringing.

“I’ll say more for you next time, sir,” she promises, and signs off.

He appreciates her assumption that there’s going to be a next time. He’s half a mile from the nearest exit, and the corridors are crawling with heavily armed stormtroopers. There’s no way he’s going to make it unless he can find a way to clear a path. 

His eyes fall on the body of a deactivated KX Enforcer.

He immediately drops his blaster and grabs his toolkit.

* * *

The commandos joke that K-2SO is Cassian’s way of telling them that he doesn’t really like their company.

K-2 doesn’t disagree with that assessment.

It might be a joke when they start keeping track of who saves Cassian’s life more often, but it gets serious when their tallies creep towards the double digits. Cassian pretends not to know about it because the competition makes them all that much sharper, and he’ll take whatever advantage he can get.

* * *

The rebels on Onderon plant bombs throughout the royal city and detonate them while an entire company of stormtroopers is conducting a cordon and search. Two dozen stormtroopers are killed by the explosions, but so are fifty-eight civilians, including children. When the Council summons the commander, Saw Gerrera, to answer for the loss of life, he sends a message calling it “acceptable collateral damage” and refuses to appear. The treaty with his forces is revoked, and the Alliance issues a rare public statement disavowing his actions.

Most of the soldiers from Onderon defect as soon as they hear it. Cassian isn’t surprised to see Vidya among them, and doesn’t try to stop her, even thought part of him thinks- as her commanding officer- that he should. She pauses before boarding her shuttle and offers him one last salute. He turns and walks away without returning it.

Two hours later, he and the other remaining troops are given orders to evacuate to Yavin IV.

* * *

He assassinates two Imperial spies who have been operating on Tatooine and leaves their bodies behind a cantina in Mos Eisley. He figures there are enough potential murder suspects there for him to avoid detection. He doesn’t anticipate someone trying to murder him for the all credits they think he must be carrying.

He ends up with a concussion and blaster wound to his left side, and it hurts like nothing he’s ever felt before. He can’t draw a breath, and his vision keeps whiting out, and-

“I told you there was an 82% chance that you would be shot on this mission,” K-2 says, sounding both smug and reproachful.

“You’re up on the commandos now,” Cassian murmurs, struggling to stay upright when all his body wants him to do is curl into a ball. He has no idea how the droid found him, but it’s suddenly too difficult to form the words to ask.

K-2 says something else, but it doesn’t really register. Cassian feels himself being prodded to start walking, but after that his awareness flickers. At some point his legs give out, so K-2 picks him up and carries him.

The next thing he knows, he’s in the medbay on Yavin IV, waking up with bandages around his torso and the taste of bacta in his mouth.

K-2 looms over his cot and says, “I am glad you are not dead, Cassian. That would not have been an optimal outcome.” Then, a beat later- “Your commandos would have won.”

It hurts to laugh, but Cassian can’t help it.

* * *

Bail Organa sends a summons as soon as Cassian is released from the medbay. He hasn’t actually been cleared for duty, but it’s not his place to refuse what is effectively an order, so he puts on his uniform and reports to the briefing room. He’s thrown, momentarily, when Bail meets him at the doors and redirects him towards his private quarters. Whatever interest he has in the mission to Tatooine is not, apparently, the interest of the Council, and Cassian is warily curious.

Bail’s daughter is waiting for them when they enter the small sitting room. Cassian tries not to stare at her as she draws her father into a warm embrace, but he doesn’t miss it when she slips a data stick into one of Bail’s jacket pockets. He’s seen enough of his own couriers use the same trick to realize what's going on.

Leia Organa, princess and Imperial senator of Alderaan, is a rebel spy, and her father wants him to know exactly what kind of man he is before beginning their conversation.

“I made cups of chocolate,” Leia says, indicating three mugs on the table beside her. She starts to offer one to Cassian, then pauses, saying, “No, wait. You’re from Fest, aren’t you?” She pours something into the mug without waiting for his reply and then hands it back.

He can smell the spice before he brings the drink to his lips. It’s not exactly like his mother’s, but it’s close. “Thank you,” he tells her earnestly.

Bail smiles over the rim of his own mug, and says, “Captain Andor, the Alliance- and the royal family of Alderaan- have a friend who is in hiding on Tatooine...”

* * *

Vidya dies fighting with the partisans when they're both twenty-four.

Tivik tells him how it happens, then hands Cassian her old Alliance rank insignia and dog tags. They’re covered in fine, red dust that definitely didn’t come from Onderon, and he turns them over to their lone science officer for analysis as soon as he gets back to Yavin.

It’s dust from Jedha, he’s told an hour later. The partisans are on Jedha now, and Vidya's grave, if they were able to give her one, is somewhere in the holy sands.

He thinks she would have liked that.

He finds Leia Organa and convinces her to bring him a bottle of her father’s best whiskey. She looks on silently as he pours out a shot and smashes the glass against the ground.

* * *

He spends four hours in the command center answering questions about Krafene and Tivik’s intel, sleeps for less than two, and snaps awake when the comm starts buzzing beside his ear. He doesn't feel very rested, but it will have to be enough.

He listens to the message authorizing an extraction mission to Wobani as he pulls his boots on. Then he comms K-2 and tells the droid to get a troop transport ready.

The commandos meet him in the hanger, having already been briefed by General Draven. They’re all children of the rebellion, and Cassian doesn’t have to tell them that this could be their only hope of keeping it alive.

His mother’s hymns echo in his ears as he orders them to board the shuttle.


End file.
